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Fedora Board Meeting - 09 August 2011

  • Meeting secretary: Rex Dieter

Roll Call

Present

Jared Smith David Nalley Rudi Landmann Jon Stanley Rex Dieter Toshio Kuratomi Peter Robinson Guillermo Gómez

Not Present

Regards

Jaroslav Reznik (desktop summit) Joerg Simon

Updates

Fedora 16 Schedule

  • Go no go meeting tomorrow 5 EST
    • looks tight, may have to slip

Board Business

Trademark approval discussion

  • Purpose of this meeting is not to solve all the trademark problems or change the policy, the purpose of this meeting is to come up with a list of questions to ask Red Hat legal to have a better idea of what they might or might not find acceptable.
  • People are more important here, how can we use the policy to build trust?
  • In general, it should be easy for people doing *the right thing* to get trademark approval. The hard part is defining *the right thing*.
  • Can we adapt the community domain procedure?
    • simple procedure for trademark approval
    • Set of rules that image creators agree to
  • Issue: we've made trademark approval block everything instead of fixing the other parts of the process
    • trademark approval was meant to be a rubber stamp -- very lightweight
  • How do we approve quality?
    • Board is not the place to do that
    • Resources (like links to the images on fedoraproject.org) may be better place to limit this than trademark
  • inode0's idea of blessing certain groups
    • distributed image review (like package review) rather than blessing certain groups
    • ¿Can we reproduce the process and the img third parties use? Then review/approve.
      • is there the danger of no substantial review?
  • Historically, some people/groups wanted to have veto rights on spins that were created
    • Broken networking in a spin we linked to as an example of the problem
      • Is trademark approval the wrong place to fix this?
      • Let's separate trademark approval from quality assurance
  • Harder make it to build things, fewer use it
    • Applies to building our community -- harder for our community to build their version of Fedora
    • Applies to third parties -- if too hard, they won't produce Fedora images
  • Need to separate legal and qa concerns for asking questions but design a policy that takes both into account
    • For instance, opening trademark to all fedora contributors may not make a good policy based on QA even if it satisfies legal

(Notes from FAB thread; redact as appropriate for meeting notes):

  • Questions

1) Under the current guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Trademark_guidelines#Virtual_images_or_appliances_with_unmodified_Fedora_software http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Trademark_guidelines#Virtual_images_or_appliances_with_combinations_of_Fedora_software_with_non-Fedora_or_modified_Fedora_software

are cloud providers allowed to host Fedora images without going through explicit trademark approval by the board?

  • The assumption is that the images only contain Fedora software but may have had *configuration* modified in expected ways to work with the hardware or environment that the providers have.
  • There are other third parties that do have custom kernels, are those allowed?
  • Is there a degree of change to configuration that would not be allowed? For instance, turning off SELinux.

Proposals: Need to know if legal thinks these are sufficient to defend the trademark:

    • Note that QA concerns are separate from the legal issues we're asking Legal to advise us on

1) If the image consists solely of software from Fedora it can use the Fedora marks without explicit review and approval from the Board. The Board would forgo explicit review of images in those cases.  (images == spins/AMIimages/etc)

2) Can the Board grant ongoing usage of the trademark to specific subgroups of Fedora contributors and not explicitly review their work on an ongoing basis? (For instance, images produced by the Cloud SIG, the Fedora Unity Re-spin community, and rel-eng)

3) Can the Board grant ongoing usage of the trademark to all fedora contributors and not explicitly review their work on an ongoing basis?

Agreed: Send the three questions to RH Legal, along with getting clarification on the current wording.

Other Notes

  • Next Board meeting will be a public IRC meeting on Tuesday, August 16 at 16:00 UTC
  • Jared will likely be busy with FUDCon Milan subsidy meeting, looking for a volunteer to lead the meeting
  • Will look at approving a temporary proposal for implementing the current trademark policy for spins at next meeting
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